


"Yer a wizard, Rey..."

by Morbane



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fusion, Alternate Universe - Harry Potter Setting, Constructive Criticism Welcome
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-01
Updated: 2016-10-01
Packaged: 2018-08-18 20:29:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,564
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8174992
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Morbane/pseuds/Morbane
Summary: Sorry not sorry for title. Basically, I wanted to have some silly fun which I very much hope you, my recipient, also enjoy.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [flipflop_diva](https://archiveofourown.org/users/flipflop_diva/gifts).



> Sorry not sorry for title. Basically, I wanted to have some silly fun which I very much hope you, my recipient, also enjoy.

The first thing a small child in Britain learns about wizards is that there aren't any more of them, which feels like an awfully rough deal.

Rey's no stranger to rough deals.

She's not a small child, either, but somehow she hasn't left behind stories shared in the dark. In Simon's pub, she sits at the brightest table and does her fiddliest repair work, because Simon will let her do that if she fixes things for him, and the regulars sit in the corner full of shadows. On Mondays, Tuesdays, and sometimes Sundays, when the regulars are the only ones who come in, they debate the good old days and whether they were really the bad old days, and when it was that magic really vanished (it depends on the age of who's there).

At J.K.U., believing in magic meant you weren't tough enough for the real world. 'Voldemort' was part of a skipping rhyme. The children of J.K.U. believed only in home-grown rituals. For example, no child ever said the name of the Home in full, if they could help it. It was a point of pride, a proscription far more powerful than a curse.

But that isn't the only way the real world doesn't match how Rey always thought it would be, and though Simon never gives her anything free but light and warmth, she has a use for both of those. She doesn't have anything to say about magic, but she listens.

And she recognizes the owl when she sees it.

* * *

The owl's huddled in between the boards over the old bakery window, being poked at with sticks by kids from the Home. The screeching stops when she arrives. "It was already hurt," the biggest boy mutters, when she yells at them to leave it alone. The owl has something attached to its leg, thin and pale, and first she thinks he was right, and it's a splint, but then the owl uses its beak to push it back into place as if it's just another feather.

(The regulars say that you can tell a wizard's owl, because it'll be carrying mail. The thin white thing on the owl's leg could be a rolled-up piece of paper. Or she could just be imagining things.)

She's never seen an owl like this before - obviously it's owl shaped, but its feathers are a mottle of white, grey, and tan so bright it's almost orange. Maybe this is its baby plumage. Maybe it's very young.

She doesn't have gloves or a sack or anything else that would allow her to grab a wild bird, so after looking at it for a minute, she turns to go home. She doesn't know anyone who's good with birds, but maybe there's an official society she can call.

The owl hops down from its perch in the window and starts following her.

She's not sure what to do about that, but it doesn't seem aggressive, and she doesn't see the point in chasing it away. So she starts talking to it.

It seems to like that. It gets closer and closer and suddenly it hops up off the ground and flies --

Right up to her shoulder.

She squawks. She freezes. It's cute and all, but even a baby owl probably has some idea of how to use its beak. She closes her eyes --

And then opens them, because there is a crashing sound, and a young man wearing jeans and a long, heavy cloak is standing in front of her, mouth agape, a broken broom in his hand.

"You found him!"

She just has to ask.

"Are you a wizard?"

He stares at her, which is fair, because it's a stupid question. Then - "Yeah," he says breathlessly. "Yeah, I'm a wizard. _And we need to run..._ "

* * *

Rey opens her mouth, but both _Why_? and _Where_? are answered before she can speak, by something green and bright that comes from over her shoulder and hits the pavement with a smell of ozone. Rey's never seen anything like it before - like a fireball elongated into a line, some kind of laser weapon? - but it screams danger to her.

"Come on," she and the man say to each other at exactly the same time. He reaches out a hand to her, but she shakes it off; she's never seen him before. That means he doesn't know where to go. She does. She runs. He follows.

At least he can keep up with her. He reaches for her hand again - "No," she says. "We need to _dodge_ ," because another bolt of light has just hit a streetlight and turned it dark, and running with hands clasped is stupid.

(He was reaching for the arm the owl's perched on. The owl hissed at him. If she had breath to spare, she'd laugh.)

She leads him to the train track underpass, partly because that takes them through a boulevard with a grimy, translucent plastic roof, but also because the underpass is designed for people on foot or on bicycles, and maybe whatever’s flying after them can’t get in. And then she remembers the door set halfway along the underpass that doesn’t lead (as she thought it did when she was eleven) to a cupboard, but to quite a large storage room, and most importantly, to another door, on the other side of the underpass. Surely they can go somewhere from there.

She runs down the bike ramp to the underpass, the owl digging its claws into her shoulder. “Here,” she says.

“They can follow,” the man pants at her, waving his broom. “On these.”

The lights in the underpass are always at least half broken. They’re in luck; this afternoon it’s the near half. Maybe the gloom will buy them seconds. Speaking of buying seconds - “Can you unlock a door?” she gasps back.

“No,” he says. Wizards. Not good for much, clearly.

Rey never admits this aloud, but she believes in luck. By the time they’re at the utility door, one hand is in her pocket for a bit of metal she can pick the lock with, and wit the other hand, she reaches for the handle and _hopes_.

It swings open.

They fall through.

She has to put her arm up to stop the man tumbling after her into a stack of road cones; then she closes the door behind him and locks it, in the dark, by feel.

“There,” she says.

He’s still catching his breath. “I can’t unlock doors,” he says, “but they can.”

“Fine,” Rey says. It figures. “It’s fine. This way.”

This time, she lets him take her hand. She tugs him through the darkness, feeling out coils of wire and piles of planks with her boots. The owl’s claws relax a little on her shoulder, now that they’ve slowed down. Not much changes in here. Some of these things might have been sitting in the same spot since the year the underpass was built. And some would, except over the years, she took them, worked on them, learned from them. It only makes sense that this is where she has run to, since this place helped shape her, too.

They reach the outer door. This time, Rey knows there’s no hope of finding it unlocked. She drops the man’s hand and grabs a lock pick; as she’s fitting it to the lock, there’s a soft glow behind her. Their pursuers have made their way in.

“Hold still,” she mutters, leaning against the door with one hand, feeling the lock out with the other. There.

“Help me with this,” she adds, as softly as possible - there’s a bolt as well as a lock.

Not quietly enough. A flash of red lights them up from behind. Another sizzling laser-strike bursts across the door, between them - with enough violence to blow half of it away.

The man ducks through it first. This time, when he reaches back to pull her out, too, she lets him.

She thought they’d have more time at this point. She can think of only one place to go. “The car yard,” she tells him, and leads the way again, not waiting for wizards to blast the place apart behind them and pour out and upwards into the air.

* * *

The next part is a two-mile dash. They have a head start, but on this side of the train tracks there's a lot of empty ground - a lumber yard and a struggling gardening place and not much else but fields and concrete yards along the road. Places with locked fences. They've managed to dash out of sight of the underpass before their pursuers got through, but once the wizards on broomsticks figure out just how few places there are for Rey and the owl and the man to _go_ , Rey's sure they'll hone in on the car yard.

The car yard is another place that's abandoned by everyone except Rey. Nothing's come through its gates by wheel for at least five years. The owner went bankrupt and left town and there's some kind of weird council dispute, and the end of the story is that all the cars and fridges and junk just sits there. It's full of broken things, but they aren't getting any more broken. For Rey, that's kind of comforting.

She has pet projects scattered across the yard - cars she's been tinkering with for months or even years. Some are just for practice; some are almost good enough to drive out of here. No one would know, to look at them which ones she cares about. She's counting on that. 

The man says, "What?" when she jerks him to a stop beside a car with its right side levered up and a tarpaulin stretched across its rear window. The owl screeches in agreement. Rey grins. 

"Hop in," she says. "Keep quiet." She jerks open the front passenger door and then wiggles her way through to the back seat. After a moment, he follows. He closes the door behind him, delicately; Rey almost giggles. He has more trouble than her squeezing between the front seats, but he makes it through.

They're silent for a minute, arranging themselves in the back seat and hunkering down. The owl hops off Rey's arm and makes as if to explore the front seats. Rey reaches out an arm to herd it back; it looks back at her. "Don't," she clarifies. It hops back, more responsive to the words than the gesture. How smart _are_ wizard owls, anyway? This one's already put up with more than any normal owl ever would.

Under his breath, the man says, "What is this car, anyway?"

Rey murmurs back, a little defensively, "It's a Ford Falcon AU. Circa 2000. Who're you, anyway?"

He swallows. "Phineas," he says. He says the name like it tastes bad. Okay then.

"I might call you Finn, then," she says. Unexpectedly, he smiles. "I'm Rey."

There's a flash of red light somewhere behind them; Rey sees it reflecting off something in the left mirror. Along with the red light, there's a crash. 

"I think they're just aiming curses around," Phineas - Finn - says, under cover of the crash. "Trying to get us to run." 

"What can they do to a car?" Rey asks levelly, as though it's only of mild interest. After all, they're here now.

"What they did to the door," Finn whispers back. Well, that's not good. "Though, that was a strong one. That was probably Phasma herself." Another name that he pronounces with distaste.

The owl reconsiders its earlier caution and hops through to the front seat. "Stay down," Rey hisses at it. She's kind of gutted the glove compartment; it hops in. Maybe it has the same affinity cats have to drawers. She doesn't think it can make too much trouble there, and at least it's out of sight --

And if she'd said that thought aloud, it would have qualified as famous last words. There's a puff of blue, glittery smoke that rises up from the glove box, like the most absurd booby trap Rey's ever heard of, and like nothing she's ever suspected was there. It gusts through the car, smelling like grilled cheese, and flies through the window. There's a call in the distance.

"What did you _do_ ," Rey hisses at the owl, feeling horribly betrayed.

There's a shadow over them. Rey doesn't want to look up. 

"Merlin's piss," Finn says. "I'm so sorry."

Then something lands over them with a thump, blotting out the daylight. There's a musky, ashy, sweaty smell. They're covered in-- something? She wonders if they've been bundled up in some kind of net, car and all. That doesn't make any sense, but really, nothing about this makes any sense.

Then a chink of light returns. There's a softer crunching sound, and a man ducks under the black material covering them and taps on the front passenger window.

"Mind if I come in?" He doesn't wait for them to answer. "Not much an Expelliarmus can do to Chewie up there, but he'll thank me not to use him as a shield any longer than I have to. Even to cross paths with my favourite lost car."

 _His_ lost car?

Rey sees a flash of red where the daylight peaks in. The thing above her howls.

Rey's mind presents her with the conclusion that the thing stretched over them isn't some kind of cloth. It's a wing.

The man takes keys out of his pocket, and jabs them into the Ford Falcon's ignition. "There," he says. "Hold on." He yells upwards. "Got a good grip, Chewie?"

There's another howl.

The man turns the keys. 

Rey hears a pop, then a roar. Then she feels a wave of nausea. The car rocks, and settles back on the ground, but they're no longer tilted to the left side. And the pile of cars to the right of them is just _gone_ , replaced by a green field.

"That was a portkey," Finn says, sounding stunned.

"Good boy," the man in the front seat says. He sounds pleased. He pats the steering wheel. "God almighty, I've missed this girl."

Rey's tempted to ask him why he left her in a junk yard so long, then. Or even to ask him what he sees in the blue AU. It was never more than a mid-range model even when it was new. But then he might ask her why _she_ made such a project of it, and she can't really explain that. She just liked it, was all. "Where are we?" Rey asks instead. "Who were those people? What's going on?"

Finn and the man exchange a knowing sort of look that exasperates Rey all over again.

"We're out of danger for now," the man says. "Explanations in time. But someone'll make them, I suppose. You'll need them. You're a witch, girl."

He pats the dashboard again. "This old girl wouldn't have taken to you so much if you weren't."

"Oh," Rey says. Just like that, she's not mad any more; she's not even scared. She should be. But she doesn't have _room_ to be, she's so excited at the thought of what she might do.

And it's dawning on her that along with two strange men, an owl, and a dragon, she's left the world she knew behind. This one is entirely new.


End file.
